Author Topic: Anyone been getting 403 errors when connecting to a server? (Solved)  (Read 648 times)

I've been getting these on a few servers and I would like to know how this is caused.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2016, 08:39:41 PM by Kyuande »

Never had this before but I don't know if this should belong in help.

Well from basic knowledge and past encounters I suppose this is caused by a sudden connection loss kinda obvious. I've only seen this on some websites when they go down for a short amount of time, and I don't know if it makes a difference but on the TF2 Wiki I randomly get a 503 error.

This happens when you're automatically IPbanned by BlockNet for reconnecting to a single server too quickly. On shared nodes this is usually passed out of Blockland and onto the firewall preventing any further connections. I created this system to specifically prevent the Blockland specific dos attack that was produced by spamming massive amounts of torque connection requests, which would overload the Blockland application much more easily than it would affect the network (Gyt-whatever his name is had this issue on a number of occasions which prompted me to develop this, since BlockNet's network can tolerate most normal packet floods this attack was the only thing that could really make an impact on the server).

Anyways, the fact that you can still connect and are getting that error means that the torque-side code is being run on a server that isn't one of the shared BlockNet nodes. The ban list is stored in a global variable and therefore would be reset after the server restarts. If you want to contact the host to let you through, you can ask them to run deleteVariables("$antiSpam*"); to unblock you without a restart.

Also this is all under the assumption that this is my code producing this error code, it's possible that a different mod is doing it. Though I think that would be an unlikely coincidence.

Weird, yeah I was trying to connect to Rose The Floran's server and it seems I have triggered the block even though every disconnect I had a timeout for 1 second. Looks like I can't connect until they restart. Thanks Pecon.

That seems pretty abusive of you despite the issues with the attacks on your servers. Cowboy6 did something very similar to that with CBMHost and I didn't approve of that either. Not like an IP ban would make much of a difference if someone was dedicated enough to bypass it.

I don't see how it's abusive if it's sole purpose is to prevent a certain type of dos attack, in which case connecting and disconnecting normally in a repeated manner also counts as something that would trigger it. Regardless of whether or not they are actually doing it maliciously the filter is timed to only trigger in cases where it would certainly be impacting the well being of the server and people connected to it. I think the obvious lesson here is that you should be careful to be sure that you're not spamming connections to a server, even if it's only on accident. If you're having troubles staying connected to a server then instead of spamming it with rejoins which will disrupt people on the server, you should just try a different server instead.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2016, 08:50:05 PM by Pecon »